Peggle 2: The Kotaku Review

Peggle is a puzzle game that involves clearing coloured pegs from a board by shooting balls from the top of the screen, but that's not what the game is about. It's about getting to the explosively colourful celebration at the end of each level, and Peggle 2's celebrations are the most satisfying yet.

It could be argued that any level-based puzzle game is all about the big payoff at the end, but the Peggle franchise takes that concept to the extreme.

The camera zooms in on the ball, following it in slow motion as it collides with the final peg, a tense moment that explodes into a triumphant festival of lights and sounds. A rousing rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" rings out as fireworks splash across the screen, the level score counting up dramatically, like a reverse New Year's Eve countdown. In Peggle 2's initial levels, a cartoon unicorn bangs his head along with the music.

It's during these brief periods of raucous merrymaking when Peggle 2 almost — almost — feels like a sequel to the 2007 original, and not just a slight variation on a theme with a sharp graphical makeover. The rest of the time, that's exactly what it is.

Setting aside the semi-ironic excitement surrounding the game's announcement as a timed Xbox One exclusive, Peggle 2, as with its predecessors, remains one of the most casual of casual games. A mix of arcade classic Breakout and Japanese mechanical arcade game Pachinko, the core gameplay of a Peggle title involves aiming, firing, and then waiting as a ball the player has absolutely no control over slowly bouncing to the bottom of the screen. The game handles well enough with the Xbox One controller, and supports stupid Kinect control for people who crave the danger of reduced precision and looking silly.

It's not particularly exciting, watching those balls drop. In fact, early on in a new round when the field is filled with pegs, I'm often so lulled by the relaxing plunking noises that I find myself dozing off. It's not until I get down to those last few pegs that the excitement for the celebration begins to build. The rush of finishing a level carries directly into the next level, and before I know it I am gently snoring on the couch with controller in hand.

There's just not a lot of room in the Peggle formula to inject excitement, and Popcap stuck closely to formula, at least for the game's initial release. The most stimulating improvements they've made are in the visual and animation departments — the game's four new Masters (there are five at launch, including the returning Bjorn the Unicorn) are colourful characters that wouldn't be out of place in an animated feature. Unfortunately their charm is limited to the lower left-hand corner of the screen, and aside from Master two — a troll modelled after Jeff Bridges' character in The Big Lebowski — none of them have anything interesting to say.

Sure, they lend their special powers to the game, but it many cases these new abilities do more harm than good. Lebowski troll's bowling boulder smashes its way straight to the bottom of the screen, ruining many potential skill shots along the way. The yeti-ish Berg's power actually mildly breaks the game, allowing pegs to slide about the board freely.

Peggle 2 isn't so much new Peggle as it is more Peggle. 60 main stages and 60 skill-based challenges looks like a lot of content on paper, but the game's "one more level" structure means players can burn through all of those in a couple of hours. There's online multiplayer, in which up to four players compete on separate boards to see who can score the highest, but it's not so much playing with others as it is playing near them.

This is only the beginning for Peggle 2. Earlier this week, Popcap announced a free multiplayer Duel Mode, in which players take turns clearing the same board for points, which actually sounds rather exciting. The promise of additional levels down the line and perhaps even more game variety suggest the game may grow far beyond its modest debut.

As it stands, Peggle 2 is just more Peggle — charming, casual and classic. No game has ever made a player feel so good about hitting pegs with tiny metal balls.

The music cannot be praised enough. Each character has their own famous classical song. But it starts off really simple, playing this the chords and bits of the melody, teasing the real theme. As you clear more orange pegs the theme gets stronger and more boisterous variations of the well known melody creep in until you've got one orange peg left when the music lowers a slow tension begins to play, strings constantly humming creating a feeling of anticipation, until you hit it and the full theme plays in showstopper form.

Also, each peg you hit is an ascending note that corresponds with the scale around which the song is based. The unicorn character's Ode to Joy's pegs play a major scale, the little undead girl's pegs play a harmonic minor scale.

If you're a music theory nerd like me it's heaven to listen to. Whoever does the music for these games is a really clever and creative individual who has a deep love for classical music.

There should be a huge FAIL stamp on this for being an Xbox exclusive. I'm getting really sick of the whole exclusive titles thing. It's just plain stupid.
That's like making a TV show and saying you can only watch it on a Samsung TV. Doesn't that just sounds absurd?

No cos it depends on what hardware you own not what service you use. Your example would be more like a game that's only available on steam or only on origin. That's still annoying but at least they are free platforms.

It's a simple marketing play. A game as simple as this, I agree, should have gone multi-platform for best effect. But with bigger titles like Halo 5, it makes sense it's only coming out on one platform. In Halo 5's case, microsoft studios are using it as a way to get people to buy the xbox one, therefore making more than just ninety-odd dollars on a game. I'm an xbox guy, but I really loved Resistance on the PS, I'm not going to spend money on another console to get it though. Inquisitorsz, you're right, it's dumb, but it will never change. Not while companies are making a buck off it.

Only logged in users may vote for comments!

Get Permalink

Trending Stories Right Now

I don't know if it's a universal thing, but in any office I've been at, you can generally spot who the gamers are by looking at the amount of annual leave that's banked up. For whatever reason, gamers tend to be the ones in the offices that rarely take annual leave, are generally the ones working over public holidays and Christmas ... until a major release comes out.

Borderlands 3 is almost certainly the game that you think it is. Six hours in, a lot of my feelings remain the same as they were when I first played Borderlands 3 at an extended preview last month. In a lot of ways it’s a time capsule, in some ways embarrassingly retrograde in its sensibilities, and in other ways confident that its central draw of shooting and looting always was and will continue to be enough. Because of how little the franchise has changed, the best way to know if Borderlands 3 is for you is to boot up one of the previous games in the series and see how well it works for you today.